ready steady book – Three Percent

Ready Steady Book's Books of the Year Symposium

Chad Post — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:10:15 +0000

Over at Mark Thwaite has posted the “Books of the Year 2008 symposium” featuring recommendations from a host of authors, translators, and reviewers, including Scott Esposito (who recommends Adolfo Bioy Casares and others), Charlotte Mandell (who is all about Flann O’Brien), her husband Robert Kelly (who recommends Littell’s The Kindly One, Marias’s Dark Back of Time, and Nadas’s The Book of Memories), and Tom McCarthy (whose only recommendation is Toussaint’s Camera) among others.

Definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re looking for good recommendations to kick off 2009.

On Josipovici's The Inventory

E.J. Van Lanen — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:28:11 +0000

Over at Ready, Steady, Book, there’s at Gabriel Josiopivici’s The Inventory (1968) and what it attempts to accomplish.

But for Josipovici, incompleteness is itself precisely one of the things that the realist novel shuns by assuming that it already is the perfect vehicle for anything one might wish to express. The Modernists and their precursors such as Sterne and Rabelais saw that the regular and incurious form of the realist novel reinforced a view of life that, for starters, denied the pivotal roles of doubt, ambiguity and failure in human affairs. In Proust, Kafka and Eliot, Josipovici found writers who not only realized that art is often unable to articulate our experience, but who had also grasped that this understanding had to be worked into the very heart of the writer’s approach.

Stefan Themerson, Amazing Artist

Chad Post — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:57:09 +0000

just posted an essay by Sophie Lewis—manager of Dalkey Archive’s London operation—on Stefan Themerson—whose books Dalkey reprinted a couple years ago—that’s worth checking out.

There’s a lot more about Themerson that can—and should—be said, and there are a few resources online about him, including Nicholas Wadley’s article from and .

I was at Dalkey when Themerson’s works were reprinted, and absolutely love his writing. I also had the opportunity to visit Nick and Jasia at the Archive and see the film Sophie refers to. It’s an amazing experience, and Stefan’s and Franciszka’s art and collaborations are mind-blowing.

I may be misquoting, but my favorite moment in the documentary is the moment when Stefan explains that he named one of his books and characters Cardinal Pölätüo in hopes of overcoming his fear of umlauts.